


fire like lightning

by fireflyslove



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Force Ghosts, Gen, The Force
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-10
Updated: 2018-04-10
Packaged: 2019-04-21 00:35:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14273067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fireflyslove/pseuds/fireflyslove
Summary: Luke and the significant fires of his life.





	fire like lightning

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this gifset](https://gffa.tumblr.com/post/172777484857), fire has never been particularly kind to Luke, so I summoned this character study of sorts. 
> 
> Some say the world will end in fire  
> Some say in ice  
> From what I’ve tasted of desire,  
> I hold with those who favor fire  
> But if it had to perish twice  
> I think I know enough of hate  
> To say that for destruction ice  
> Is also great  
> And would suffice  
> -Robert Frost

 

* * *

 

_i. mustafar_

Before they’re even born there’s fire everywhere. The entire world is burning, and it’s not just the lava. A father should not kill a mother, but Anakin Skywalker is so twisted by his own internal conflagration that he fails to realize what he’s doing until it is too late.

 

He dances through fire, wielding a sword of light, but he fails, and then he burns.  

 

Anakin Skywalker burns, and from his ashes arises Darth Vader. Somewhere across the galaxy, the flame of his wife’s life is snuffed as her children are brought into the world and an ancient evil steals her life.

* * *

 

_ii. tatooine_

The scorching sands of Tatooine are nothing to one raised here, stay out of the hot suns and you will live. Fire is a rare thing on a world with little to burn. Even cookfires are rare here.

 

Luke has never seen such a great plume of smoke before, but he instinctively knows what it means. Humans weren’t always desert dwellers. The shell of his childhood home smolders, the charred remains of his family a testament to the ravages of the flame.

 

Across the desert, the suns set.

* * *

 

 

iii. _the death star and beyond_

A single plasma shot into the heart of a space station should not produce such effects, Luke thinks later. But it does. In a single instant, Luke is pulling out of the Death Star’s equatorial trench, when the entire dome of the cockpit turns orange.

 

An expanding ball of gas and debris threatens to envelop him, but it doesn’t, he’s too quick for that. The rest of the Rebellion pilots escape similarly unharmed.

* * *

 

  
_iv. dagobah_

The fire in this strange, small hut is a welcome buffer against the moist cold air of the swamp outside. Luke is frustrated beyond belief at this frog with his confounding manner of speech, but he perseveres, Obi-Wan said there was a Jedi Master to be found.

 

The frog turning out to _be_ that Jedi Master is still surprising, but at least the frog has warm cooked food on this cold damp world.

* * *

 

_v. the space between stars_

Over the coming years, thousands of explosions will be seen as ships die in battle, their internal atmospheres ignited and suddenly released into the vacuum of space. With everyone of them, Luke can feel the deaths of the people on board as they pass into the Force. It’s a death by a thousand cuts, but it’s not anything he’s ever going to mention.

* * *

 

  
_vi. endor_

It seems the end of things here, in the darkness and night as he sets a torch to the pyre. The kindling takes, and quickly there is a wave of heat rushing out from the accelerant-soaked logs. The plastioid of Darth Vader’s armor is slow to melt, even in the inferno’s heat, but the fabric is quickly burned away.

 

Luke doesn’t stay for the entire pyre’s destruction, there is a celebration to be had, and he doesn’t think that his father would have wanted him to stand around in the dark mourning his empty armor all night.

 

Instead he heads for the friendly campfires of the Ewoks’ settlement, and the friends that await him there. Indeed, when he sees the ghosts of the Jedi, he knows his father is here, in the light with him, not deep in the forest on an unmarked pyre.

* * *

 

 

vii. _naboo_

Leia and Han marry in a quiet ceremony that unknowingly mirrors her father’s years before. Luke is there as a witness, dressed in his newly adopted Jedi robes, still uncomfortable in the mantle they seem to place upon his shoulders.

 

The ceremony is something resembling a traditional Alderaanian wedding, albeit with native Naboo flowers standing in for the Alderaanian bridal rose. Somewhere in the middle of it, Luke is asked to bring forward the candle he had been issued prior to the start of the ceremony. Leia and Han light it with the hands that have been tied together, and in the darkening twilight, the glow of the candle casts strange shadows on the curve of her abdomen, the growing pregnancy just beginning to show through her favored loose dresses.

* * *

 

 

viii. _the jedi temple_

It was the work of decades to construct this place, and it’s gone in a matter of hours. Luke doesn’t clearly remember the time between entering Ben’s rooms and waking up here next to R2-D2 nearly on fire, but something happened that put a deep rend in the Force.

 

The heat billowing off the burning building reminds him of both his father’s pyre and his burning childhood home.

 

Luke cannot cry enough tears to put out the fire, so he runs.

* * *

 

_ix. ahch-to_

The tree burns. The ancient history of the Jedi gone in a single lightning strike. He’s old enough now to know that even Yoda, the most ancient Jedi he’s ever met, doesn’t know the full breadth and depth of the Force. It’s not about light sides and dark sides, it’s about control. Giving in and allowing the Force to consume you is like allowing a small cookfire to become a raging wildfire.

 

Luke doesn’t try to put this fire out either. He has no way of knowing that the books were smuggled out by Rey, but he finds comfort in the knowledge that he has taught her at least something, even if he’s not sure exactly what that was.

* * *

 

 x.  _everywhere/nowhere_

It’s obvious, looking at them, that the suns low in the sky are great balls of fire. Even as a child, Luke knew that the twin suns of Tatooine flamed with unimaginable heat. He closes his eyes and imagines the heat on his face is from those suns. It’s that image that he fixes in his mind as he _lets go_ , somehow indescribably transforming himself from a being of flesh and blood into one of energy and Force. He does not need to turn to see, he can See and Know and Be now, his essence joined with the greater cosmic balance.

 

Below him, or maybe above him, an empty cloak floats away on the wind into the setting suns, disappearing almost as if it were burning up in their light.

**Author's Note:**

> @anakinslefthand on Tumblr


End file.
